One fundamental step in the packaging of pharmaceutical industry products as well as in many other industries is the step of washing the containers. Vials, bottles, jars and other containers, whether made from glass or plastic or other materials, are often contaminated during the manufacturing process. Sometimes storage conditions are less than totally clean, due to the need of maintaining large inventories of bottles, vials, and the like, so the danger of contamination exists. Even when sterilization is employed with these containers, the presence of sterile dirt or other undesirable solid particles would be unacceptable and additional cleaning would be necessary.
Health regulations may require that containers be cleaned, preferably by washing with hot water, for example, followed by an air rinse even if the container is later to be sterilized. Sometimes, sterilization does not take place until after the product has been placed in the container. For that reason, there is a need to provide apparatus for washing bottles and the like with a high degree of efficiency.
It is clearly not practical to wash every container by hand and, therefore, it has been necessary to propose various machines for washing bottles and the like. One major difficulty which all of the prior art machines possess is that there is a significant amount of breakage when these containers are handled by various elements of the machine. Breakage occurs during the introduction of the bottle to the apparatus as well as when the bottle is withdrawn from the washing apparatus. Moreover, the force of washing with fluids such as hot water is also a source of breakage. Particularly when large numbers of glass bottles are to be washed, there is particular concern that the bottles will bump one another or bump hard metal parts, thereby causing breakage of the bottles. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for washing bottle which minimizes breakage.
In some instances, the finish of a bottle provides a very narrow opening, thereby limiting access to the interior of the bottle. Nevertheless, the interior is the area which is most important to clean. Other bottles have relatively sharp divergence between the neck and the rest of the bottle, making it difficult for water under pressure to enter the bottle and contact the entire interior surface of the bottle.
Methods for inserting a nozzle into the interior of a bottle have not met with success for several reasons. Primarily, insertion of a washing nozzle into the interior of the bottle requires accurate positioning of the bottle with respect to the nozzle and this has been unattainable in high volume washing equipment until now. Even when the position of the bottle and the nozzle are accurately located, the timing of the insertion has been difficult to synchronize, thereby negating the accuracy of the placement. It is therefore another object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for washing bottles which functions precisely while operating at relatively high speeds.
Most machines for washing bottles and the like function like greatly enlarged dishwashers, in that bottles are placed in the unit, washed and removed. This "batch process" method is inefficient in modern production lines, where most or all of the other operating stations are continuous rather than batch process. Yet another object of this invention is to provide a continuous process for washing bottles.